GONE's remark raises a good point, but if you feel confident in your ability, don't let it deter you in attempting to make neck-through design. Just think through the process before you do anything, make notes and then review the process each time you work on a piece of wood so you minimize the chance of any mistakes. When considering a bolt-on neck vs a neck-through, each has its own technical challenges that must be dealt with.
There's a lot of information available at your finger tips through the development of the Internet and sites like this one where there's a tremendous exchange of information. I think Talkbass probably has the Lion's share of information exchange compared to any other individual website.
I built a fretless 4-string bass 24 years ago with a bolt-on neck. The hardest thing about a bolt-on neck that I ran across when building it (and there were no proto-types or replaced parts with this bass, just the final product) is ensuring the alignment of the neck in the neck heel along the longitudinal axis of the bassbody - neck combination is precise so that it "looks" right (note that the eye can detect extremely minute variations) and ensures the strings will go over the pickup correctly. The other thing that I took time with was letting the wood acclimate in my house before doing any carving to help avoid possible checking and/or splitting. The body is black walnut and the neck is hard maple with an ebony fingerboard. All the hardware is brass, except for the tuners which are the old, nickel-plated Fender, elephant-ear tuners.
I started the bass by acquiring the wood for the neck and fingerboard in 1983, while living in Virginia, and started shaping/carving it after allowing it to acclimate for 4 months. The body came later after moving 600 miles and building a house. Later I found a gorgeous 6 ft slab of black walnut and used half for the body. (I still have the other half and have been thinking of how I'd like to use it; probably a neck-through design.) The bass was obviously not a kit (I don't know if any for EBG existed back then). Everything was from scratch, including some of the hardware; control plate, bridge, neck plate. The bass was completed in April '85 and its first usage was on a big band gig in May in the NY Fingerlakes region opening for Herbie Mann and his group.
Oh, there's no truss rod. I carved the necessary concavity along the long axis over a period of time. With an ebony fingerboard about 1/4 to 3/8 ths inch thick glued to a hard-maple neck, I doubted whether a truss rod would be able to have much of an effect on flexing the neck, so I decided not to use one. I still play this bass on 80 to 90% of my gigs where I play EBG. I changed the pickup from a passive Dimarzio to active EMGs 7 or 8 years ago and put Thomastik-Infeld Jazz Flat strings on it about 3 years ago.
Its an interesting process that you'll thoroughly enjoy. Have fun.
Lloyd Howard
